Expounding the Latest Tech Trends at India Software Developer Conference 2013


Bangalore: We can’t deny that the various innovations in the technology space have grown tremendously in the past few years and it’s of utmost importance for ever software developer to know about what’s new and what has gone obsolete. With this in mind, SiliconIndia organized India Software Developer Conference on March 16, 2013 in Bangalore. The conference was a phenomenal platform for  software developers to know more about the emerging as well as the growing trends. It wasn’t only Software Developers who benefitted from the conference, but  Architects, Managers and many more gained insights on the latest trends in Big Data, Cloud, Agile and other technologies.

The conference kick started with a Keynote Session by Sanjay Purohit, SVP & Global Head - Products, Platforms and Solutions, Infosys. Sanjay gave a phenomenal talk on “Building Tomorrow’s Disruptive Enterprise” where he discussed on seven key areas which are rapidly increasing in influence, and the present great scope for innovation. He not only explained about the trends  but also illustrated on how technology led innovations are at the center of tomorrow’s enterprises and how software engineers should prepare to succeed in the new environment.

Vivek Subramanyam, CEO, iCreate Software delivered an insightful Keynote Address on”Hello Tomorrow: Architecting a Nexgen Techscape”. He spoke about how/why products are being built and also answered the question as to why yesterday's solutions are not enough to meet tomorrow's needs. Furthermore, he not only highlighted the need to imagine a framework that fosters the ‘unconventional’, but also the need to have an understanding of the evolving behavioural trends, as they are the cornerstones to building tomorrow's products and solutions.

The Keynote Sessions were then  followed by  interesting technical sessions in three exciting parallel tracks: Development Track, Architecture and Design Track and Enterprise at Scale Track. 

Santhanakrishnan Raman, Managing Director, LSI India R & D initiated the Development track with an interesting talk on “Product Development by Global Teams – A System Design Perspective”. Raman’s session answered questions such as: In highly complex electronic systems how do you do software/hardware concurrent development?  What are the tools, methodologies one adopts? How can one accelerate the product development in this case? When engineering work is distributed across the globe, what are the additional challenges such a development model bring to the software/hardware concurrent development? He explained the above scenario with some advanced case studies of product development from the Storage and Networking domains.

The next session was on “Building a Great Platform” by Pankaj Sinha, Head Rational Lab, IBM India. According to him, “you need an open platform that helps address three basic requirements- Efficient Product Lifecycle Management, Facilitating Industry-specific content & Promoting an Open Ecosystem. IBM is promoting the Jazz Platform.”

Abhishek Kant, Country Manager, Telerik India in his session “Collaborative Agile Development” highlighted the philosophies and processes behind Agile Scrum. He also focused on dealing with the issues involved in Agile processes and on how one can use Telerik TeamPulse to ensure a  smooth agile implementation of an organization’s project.

Speaking on the topic “Business Relevance of APIs for the Enterprise & Cloud”, Narayanan Subramaniam, Principal Engineer, Cisco Systems covered a wide range of useful topics related to Cloud and Big-Data, thereby providing useful discussion points that are related to the current trends in the industry.

Speaking on the topic “Emerging Technologies and Trends”, Dorai Thodla, Founder, iMorph said “A trend is your friend. Tracking emerging technology trends is a great way to find new product opportunities, high paying jobs and keep track of the industry. Track several trends and pick a few to focus on and analyze trends by identifying drivers, barriers and impact before selecting the opportunities.”

Virendra Gupta, SVP & Business Line Head, Huawei Technologies, while discussing on “Software Platform Development – An Experience”  said “Software platform design need to be modular, extensible, should have the ability to handle contract abuse and overload conditions gracefully. Software platform development needs higher level of skills and competence in multiple domains. Quality requirement of software platforms are higher than products.“

Architecture Track took a grand start with a session on "Big Data Analytics – Technology Platforms to Play Critical Role in Driving Insights" by Arnab Chakraborty, Managing Director, Accenture Consulting – Global Talent & Innovation Network (GTIN). According to Arnab, “Big Data and Analytics provide a great opportunity to combine the skills of data architects, data scientists, and technologists to help solve critical business problems and drive significant business outcomes across all walks of business, government, environment, and humanity.”

"The technology landscape is fast evolving and some of the sessions enabled thinkers to get abreast of industry and competitive trends. Other sessions allowed doers to associate the trends to the actual tasks. This duality of operation will be increasingly common in dynamic environments" said by Nishad Kamat, Senior Director of Engineering, Yahoo!

While covering the aspects related to “Architecture Drift: In Search of Scalability”, Vasanthi Ramesh, Director SET, Flipkart spoke about the changes in architecture and the consequent changes in quality assurance. It emphasized on testable architecture to facilitate the agility and scalability for businesses.

Atul Kabra, Solutions Architect, McAfee India presented the dark and unsafe side of the cyber world by showing how malware authors are adopting newer and smarter technologies including digitally signed malwares to by-pass traditional models of OS security. His talk also covered the changing motivations of malware authors from creating a mere menace to creating more organized crime and attacks. He also covered the details of some of the advanced malwares like stuxnet, flame and shamoon. His talk concluded in the various new trends like sandboxing and white listing technologies that the security companies are adopting to thwart from such attacks and keep the cyber space clean.

Balasubramanian Somasundaram, Enterprise Architect, Microsoft discussed on the topic “Impact of Natural User Interfaces on Enterprise Applications”. According to him, Natural User Interface trend will build upon and intersect with many of the other emerging technology trends. He also spoke about the  NUIs which will enable enterprises to build and deliver immersive experiential systems in Customer facing business functions.“

Enterprise at Scale Track kicked off with an interesting session on “Technology Modernization – Critical for Scale” by K V Suryaprakash, Vice President, Head of Delivery, Retail CPG and Logistics, Infosys. According to him, "Technology modernization is critical to scale. Scale is not just about ensuring infrastructure for future but also creating a nimble and simple environment to cater to changing business needs on a continuous basis by adopting appropriate technology. Simplification, Consolidation, Virtualization, Automation and Cloud adoption are critical elements."

The next session was on Technology Behind Smart Cloud, IaaS... SaaS, including Cloud Architecture in IT Enterprise & ROI. Amol Mahamuni, Program Director, IBM India Software Lab discussing on this topic said  “Today, Cloud computing has matured as the preferred platform of choice to optimize capex.” He also highlighted on the IT Budgets, Smart Cloud Portfolio and Expert Integrated Systems apart from highlightingthe various innovations, opportunities for clients and Efficiency which is required for the entire software development cycle.

Thejus Yerigeri, Practice Leader, EMC while discussing on Critical Architectural Considerations for Enterprise Scale Cloud-Based Solutions stressed more on “what New thinking needed...” to be able to get on to Cloud bandwagon and what developers have to understand related to what is changing in the Cloud landscape.

After these interesting sessions there was a rapid sessions round on Fascinating Tips and Tricks from the Top IT Professionals Who've Successfully Changed the Architecture at Scale where the speakers from the top notch industries gave a wonderful talk based on their expertise.

One among them was Dr. Vikram Vij, Vice President - Strategic Business Practice Head – Product R&D, Infosys. Speaking on the topic - “Digital Convergence & Pervasive Computing”, Vikram highlighted on how electronic devices around us are becoming ‘smarter’ He also shed some light on the usage Location Based Services, M2M technologies and Sensor Networks.

The event was well taken by 400+ delegates and was supported by McAfee, GitHub, ComponentOne, Telerik, Payoda, PluralSight, NeuroSpeech, DevTools, Aspose, Tata McGraw Hill and Tulip and also Bangalore Android User Group for partnering with us.